PUBLIC LIVES

PUBLIC LIVES; Elsa Klensch, Still in Style, but Out of a Job

By ROBIN FINN

Published: February 13, 2001

THE out-of-work icon of television fashion journalism tucks her legs up beneath her and assumes a comfy pose on the living room sofa. Evidently, feet-on-the-furniture etiquette is not frowned upon in Elsa Klensch's Orient-inspired domain overlooking the Museum of Modern Art's unsightly construction site. ''Everything's higgledy-pig gledy,'' she apologizes.

Talk about the din, the eyesore, the inconvenience! Not that cooking is her forte (''I'm afraid I'm not a good housekeeper''), but her stove has been disconnected since workers damaged a gas main three weeks ago, right about the time she became, temporarily she prays, a lady of leisure after parting ways with CNN.

The ruckus has made her cranky enough to consider suing Con Edison for omelet deprivation. ''But I don't suppose there's much future in taking on Con Ed,'' she muses. ''So we've bought an electric kettle, and we're getting on with it,'' she adds, a stiff-upper-lip Australian accent lending an extra layer of pique.

One wouldn't ordinarily discover Ms. Klensch, a self-styled workhorse, idling like an odalisque on a weekday afternoon with a sleek silver cell phone at her elbow. Her makeup is intense, and her hair (she canned her trademark lacquered bob when she realized that her look was being imitated -- as a Halloween costume) is freshly and fluffily coiffed. ''People were goofing around about me, going to parties as Elsa,'' she says. ''It became a joke, not that I really mind. But I did change my hair.''

She's wearing her favorite Sonia Rykiel knit jacket (a ladies-who-lunch take on bold red and black buffalo checks), ubiquitous black trousers (Ralph Lauren) and shiny black patent flats (''Diego Della Valle,'' she confides, as if sharing a secret). In a way, she is. During her 21-year tenure at CNN, she received no clothing allowance (''Zero!''), was forbidden to accept free garments (''You wouldn't want to feel an obligation to anyone'') and was instructed not to champion specific designers. And she still made it into the International Best-Dressed Hall of Fame in 1990.

She swears she's not a fashion plate, or victim, yet admits that everything she wears has a pedigree, particularly her jackets -- she has a bit of a fetish. Describing the Dalmatian print Geoffrey Beene in her closet, she sounds like a girl with a crush. Then again, structured jackets, she recites, dispensing the sort of sensible advice proffered in her trade paperback best seller, ''Style'' (Berkley, 1995), help hide body flaws. Has she got any?

''I have a big bust and would prefer to have a smaller bust,'' she announces. So why not visit the neighborhood plastic surgeon? ''It's not that big.'' Not that Ms. Klensch is against cosmetic surgery; she's had a touch. ''You can't let yourself fall to pieces,'' she protests. ''Just don't be 55 trying to look 35: that's so ridiculous.'' Ms. Klensch declines to give her age, but logic and simple math indicate that she's 60-something -- a vibrant 60-something.

BUT back to why, with Fashion Week under way in the Bryant Park tents, she's sofa-bound, flanked by a pair of antique Japanese panels collected in the course of covering 40,000 fashion shows (''One says, 'Honor thy father and mother,' the other says, 'Don't sleep with your brother' or 'Don't commit adultery,' or something like that, I forget,'' she says, her Lucille Ball-ish mouth stretched into a wicked smirk.)

No homebody, Ms. Klensch has been an on-the-road journalist -- with stints at Women's Wear Daily, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue -- for nigh on five decades. Television and fashion coverage were strangers until she and CNN pioneered the video style frontier in 1980.

But Ms. Klensch is in transition. Her program, ''Style With Elsa Klensch,'' made its debut the same day CNN went on the air and halted production the same day AOL's merger with CNN's parent company, Time Warner, went into effect last month. She did her final CNN voice-overs on Jan. 12. Though her contract runs to Saturday, she hasn't been back: there's nothing to go back to. Her style staff members were among the 400 employees laid off after the merger. CNN has not replaced them, or her.

''There were corporate changes; it was a good time to go,'' she says. She is, to put it politely, looking for a job. ''I'm nowhere yet. I always said I'd stay at CNN for 20 years, see out the millennium, then find something else.'' Anything but retirement. ''I'm so tied up with fashion and design, it almost seems impossible to live without it; it has consumed my life.''

Ms. Klensch grew up in Australia's Blue Mountains, outside Sydney. Her father died when she was ''very little''; an inheritance from her grandfather supported the family, but the income was not lavish, and she left home to find work in Sydney in her late teens. She wanted to be a political journalist: ''I've always been fascinated by power.'' She settled for writing newspaper features in Sydney and London, then drifted to New Guinea and Hong Kong, where she met her future husband, Charles Klensch, an ABC bureau chief with two children. They married in Saigon in 1966. ''I was not the marrying kind,'' she says, ''but he was.''

This week, Ms. Klensch, press credentials in hand, will put in a selective appearance at Fashion Week: Klein, Kors and Karan are must-sees, fodder, she hopes, for her next reporting job. ''I don't know what's going to happen with me,'' she says, a touch plaintively. ''But I went out on top.'' Icons usually do.